Ingrid Halvorsen grew up in Petersburg, Alaska — a fishing town founded by Norwegians, where the boats still fly the Norwegian flag on Syttende Mai and her own great-grandparents crossed from Bergen with a Bible, a net, and a family saga they told until it wore smooth. She grew up on cold water, long light, and the certainty that her ancestors’ world was worth writing about properly.

She spent fifteen years as a maritime historian and museum curator specializing in Scandinavian seafaring, which means she can rig a faering, read a saga in the original with a dictionary and a stubborn afternoon, and will tell you at length why most Viking fiction gets the ships, the law, and the women wrong. Her romances are her correction: the Norse world with its real texture — thrall custom, the Thing, the volva’s medicine, the brutal arithmetic of a raiding economy — and heroines who are healers, shieldmaidens, and traders rather than scenery.

Her Jarls of Ravensfjord series follows one fjord-clan through raid, feud, and marriage-alliance, pairing hard warriors with women who meet them as equals. Readers can expect fierce heroes who never coerce, heroines whose skills turn the plot, sensual heat with real emotional weight, the cold beauty of the north, and — always — a happily-ever-after sworn freely before the old gods.

Ingrid lives in Petersburg with her husband, Erik, a commercial fisherman who vets her seafaring, a smokehouse she is unreasonably proud of, and an enormous Norwegian elkhound named Saga who has never once retrieved anything. She still keeps her great-grandmother’s Bible, and still tells the family saga until it wears smooth.